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The Dallas City Council is preparing to wade into fracking — hydraulic fracturing to produce natural gas, for the formally minded — and tonight they’ll be able to get some public input, if members show up.

FracDallas, an umbrella organization opposing fracking in populated areas (read: the whole city), plans a public information forum. The speakers list includes people from Tarrant and Denton counties who’ll talk about fracking problems in their communities.

No one from City Hall or the natural gas industry is on the list.

The forum is free and open to anybody. It’s from 7-9 p.m. in room 237, Northaven United Methodist Church, 11211 Preston Rd. between Royal and Forest lanes.

(Fracking, by the way, is catching on as the shortcut term. The gas industry tried calling it fracing, with a K sound, but that looks like it should rhyme with bracing. Some engineer-types ventured into frac’ing, but that was obviously going nowhere. So it seems that fracking it is.)

In case you missed your latest issue of Marine and Petroleum Geology, here’s a bit of European research on hydraulically fracturing gas wells in shale, a favorite business activity in North Texas in recent years.

There’s a 1 percent chance that fracking a well will create a “rogue fracture,” a dark-sounding name for an unwanted crack in the earth, within 350 meters of the injection site, scientists found.

For the non-metric, that’s a little more than 1,148 feet, or two-tenths of a mile.

The chance that it might go as far as 600 meters, or 1,969 feet, was just a sliver of 1 percent, almost impossible.

But that was enough to lead researchers at Durham and Cardiff universities and the University of Tromsø to advocate a minimum 1,969-foot safety zone between a fracking injection site and a sensitive rock formation with groundwater.

In the Barnett Shale of North Texas, it’s believed that the distances between fracking injection sites and groundwater is more like thousands of feet. Still, as Dallas prepares to hash out its fracking rules, all such information might get tossed into the blender.

Private residents took air samples during Titan Operating’s hydraulic fracturing of a natural gas well between the two cities. According to a news release Tuesday morning from Earthworks’ Oil and Gas Accountability Project, an environmental organization, the tests found emissions of toxic chemicals, including some that were over Texas state guidelines for long- or short-term exposures.

“We paid for tests because we can’t depend on the city or the fracking industry,” Colleyville resident Kim Davis said in the release. “The tests confirmed our worst fears, while Colleyville ignored their own tests to let fracking continue. Apparently the city represents Titan and the gas industry instead of local residents.”

The Environmental Protection Agency, which made national headlines in December 2010 when it ordered natural-gas driller Range Resources to clean up pollution in Parker County drinking water, has dropped its case against the company.

In exchange, Range agreed to monitor groundwater around the alleged contamination.Each side also agreed to drop lawsuits against the other.

Federal court filings dated Thursday confirmed the cease-fire.

The EPA had accused Range and its sister company Range Production of letting natural gas enter the water well of Steven Lipsky. The agency ordered Range to provide the Lipskys with safe drinking water and conduct tests that could have resulted in an expensive cleanup.

Range loudly denied the accusation, saying its tests proved the gas in Lipsky’s well was naturally occuring and not a result of a company slipup.

The Texas Railroad Commission backed Range after a January 2011 hearing. Only the company and commission staff offered evidence.

The EPA said in a statement that it would move from lawsuits to research:

“Resolving the lawsuits with Range allows EPA to shift the agency’s focus in this particular case away from litigation and toward a joint effort on the science and safety of energy extraction.

“EPA and Range will share scientific data and conduct further well monitoring in the area, and Range will also provide useful information and access to EPA in support of EPA’s scientific inquiry into the potential impacts of energy extraction on drinking water.”

The Parker County case had pitted the EPA’s scientific assertions against the whole weight of the natural gas industry, which saw the dispute as an indicator of whether the EPA might crack down on fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, the main way of getting gas out of stubborn rock.

In light of the resolution, the case seems likely to add little or no ammunition to environmentalists’ calls for tough rules or an outright ban on fracking.

A fortune in natural gas lies beneath the western edge of Dallas. Above ground, drilling companies await a city council decision on how close to homes, schools and churches they can operate as they pull it out.

And Tuesday evening, dozens of residents met in Old East Dallas with environmental groups, lawyers and public servants who feared the worst.

“All of you today are our last, best hope to get an ordinance that is not only going to protect lives, protect water, protect air — but is going to hold drillers accountable,” council member Scott Griggs told a standing-room-only auditorium at the Center for Community Cooperation. The forum was hosted by a coalition of environmental and neighborhood groups called Dallas Residents at Risk.

Griggs represents District 3 in southwest Dallas, which includes many of the thousands of acres already leased by drilling companies. Those companies are waiting for the city to pass a suite of drilling laws before they begin blasting water and chemicals thousands of feet underground to extract the gas — a controversial process known as “fracking.”

A council vote is expected as soon as this summer. Earlier this month a task force proposed laws that would keep the drilling sites a certain distance from residential structures and mandate monitoring for contamination, among other regulations.

But those proposals didn’t go far enough for many at the meeting.

The audience was treated to a horror-show slide show of diesel engines the size of buses, convoys of semi-tractors and plumes of “volatile organic compounds” that presenters warned could overwhelm neighborhoods if the laws are too lax.

“Everybody was in love with the wells and in love with the royalty checks,” recalled Fort Worth attorney Jim Bradbury, who several years ago served on a task force to shape that city’s fracking laws. “What no one realized is to sell that oil they need pipelines. We had to level houses.”

Cries of dismay rose from the audience as forum organizer Zac Trahan showed slides of proposed drill sites in residential neighborhoods — most of them in Mountain Creek. The task force proposed a law allowing drilling as close as 500 feet from some homes, churches and schools with supermajority council approval. Every speaker at the meeting said that was far too close.

When a slide of a proposed site on city parkland in northwest Dallas flashed across the screen, a man in the audience interrupted Trahan.

“That’s LB Houston Golf Course!” he exclaimed “And it’s probably the most popular golf course in the city of Dallas.”

The speakers at meeting — including two members of the task force unhappy with its outcome — often dwelled on worst-case scenarios. But Trahan stressed in an interview beforehand that the coalition wasn’t against fracking.

“If the city is going to move forward we want them to proceed with caution, protect us and balance economic interests with environmental interests,” he said.

“This notion we want to shut down all drilling is crazy. It’s just as bad as ‘Drill, baby, drill.’”